


Out of the Cold

by jdjunkie



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Christmas fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 09:09:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdjunkie/pseuds/jdjunkie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“See? This is why I need to fill in this appalling gap in your knowledge. I mean, you know all about customs from thousands of years ago, why some long-lost culture ate roasted yak turds every third Thursday, but you know nothing about making snow angels.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the Cold

“Jack … my ass is freezing. It’s about to fall off.” He was shouting, but he felt entitled.

“Relax, Daniel. No one’s ass ever fell off because it was a little cold. And anyway, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Jack’s voice grew increasingly loud as he rounded his house from the driveway. He was armed with a snow shovel and an irritatingly smug grin.

Daniel gusted out a breath that turned into an icy cloud of condensation in the below-freezing temperatures and tried to make the mental connection between his ass and an egg-based breakfast favorite.

“I have no idea how your mind works sometimes,” Daniel grumbled. “My ass is so cold I can’t feel it and the only eggs I foresee breaking are over your head. Please remind me again why I’m lying in the snow in your yard on Christmas Eve in minus-eight degrees of butt-freezing weather.” He was elevating pissy to whole new levels of pissiness.  Daniel peered up from his prone position close to the fluffy blob of whiteness that he knew was the hydrangea bed. He squinted against the bright sun as a Jack-shaped eclipse hoved into view.

“Quit whining. This weather is the stuff of Christmas dreams.” Jack smiled down at him. Daniel wanted to wipe that grin off his face in any number of ways, stuffing a snowball in his mouth foremost among them.

“Bloody festive nightmare,” Daniel mumbled, fumbling a thick-gloved hand in his waterproof jacket’s side pocket for a handkerchief as his nose began to run.

“Tsk tsk, Daniel. Santa does not appreciate bad language. He knows if you’ve been good or bad, you know.” Jack planted the shovel into the deep snow with something akin to relish and leaned on it. “You can’t feel your ass, huh?”

“No. I can’t.” Statrospherically pissy now.

“Want me to cop a feel. See if it’s still there?”

“Gah! Either you tell me why I’m lying here or I go indoors and call Sam and tell her you made me lie in the snow and gave me pneumonia.”

The panicked look on Jack’s face was the funniest thing Daniel had seen since Teal’c dressed up as Santa at the SGC Christmas party after Hammond cried off with the flu. Daniel was still amazed that “ho ho ho” could sound so  … menacing.

“OK, OK. No need to take the threat level to Defcon 1. You are lying in the snow for two reasons, Daniel. Firstly, because I promised that if you did, I would make you hot chocolate with marshmallows and then let you take me to bed and unwrap me like a Christmas present, and secondly because it’s way past time you learned to do something I learned as a five-year-old boy in Minnesota.”

Daniel blew his nose.

Jack waited while Daniel stuffed the tissue back into his pocket, got his hand stuck, yanked and tugged and swore and finally pulled it free.

“You never said my _ass_ would fall off.” Sometimes Daniel sounded like a whiny seven-year-old, even to himself.

“Hot chocolate, Daniel. Dirty, naughty, loud sex, Daniel,” Jack wheedled.

“Dirty, naughty, loud sex minus one ass.”

“Will you stop complaining about your ass.” Jack made a production number of checking out that portion of Daniel’s body, at least as far as the foot of snow would allow.  “It’s fine. Time to learn to have a little Christmas fun, my friend.”

Daniel opened his mouth to issue a sharp retort, only for Jack to raise a warning finger. “Aht! Fun, Daniel. You know that you know how to have it. Now is the time to embrace it.”

Daniel sighed heavily. “Were you always this … irritating? I mean, I remember we had disagreements occasionally. Big ones, sometimes. But I don’t remember feeling this level of … pissed-offedness with you. Before.”

“Oh, I pride myself on being able to bait you, Daniel. On occasion, I live for it.”

Despite the cold, the numb ass and the slight feeling of dislocation he still couldn’t entirely shake off, Daniel smiled. His memories of Jack were coming back one fragment at a time. His favorite so far was the one that had brought him back – really back – to the man he had loved for eight years; Jack holding him in front of the fire at Jack’s house, talking about everything and nothing, sharing red wine kisses and orgasms that left them both breathless and in tears.

The image was sharp and a gut punch and made him want to take the conversation somewhere that the moment dictated it really couldn’t go just now. _“I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’m sorry I left. I didn’t want to leave you. I just want to love you. Love me.”_

“Well, whatever it is you’re going to teach me, I’m not lying down here alone for it,” Daniel managed, running one conversation out loud and continuing the other in his still slightly-befuddled head. “Get your ass, which I’m sure is perfectly warm and oh my God so not frozen, down here, right now.”

Jack’s face lit up like the lights on the tree back in the house.

He cast aside the snow shovel, pulled the knitted woolen hat down firmly on his head, and let out a delighted “yee-haw” as he threw himself down in the snow, landing so close to Daniel’s side that they could touch fingertips.

“Nicely judged,” Daniel said, with grudging admiration.

“I have excellent spatial awareness,” Jack said, not at all modestly.

Daniel sniffed. He was definitely coming down with a cold. Probably flu. Possibly double pneumonia. He’d probably spend Christmas lounging on the sofa like a wan consumptive, and there would go any chance of dirty, naughty, loud sex. Serve Jack right.

As Daniel contemplated his sad fate, he stared up at the sky, which had suddenly changed from a clear, icy blue to feature a scattering of high fluffy clouds, tinged with threatening grey and orange. He tilted his head to the side, then back again.

“What?” Jack asked, as the silence stretched a little too long.

“That cloud, there,” Daniel pointed just past the chimney on the roof.

Jack peered, up eyes crinkling. Daniel loved it when his eyes crinkled.

“It looks like Santa’s sleigh.” Daniel turned his head hopefully towards Jack, who was peering ever more closely.

“Nope. Can’t see it.”

Daniel sketched its outline in the air. “Look; sleigh, reindeer, Santa.”

Jack appeared to give it some consideration. “OK. If that’s so, what’s that bit sticking out, there.” He joined in the pointing.

Daniel coughed. “Well, given its position, I deduce that it can only be Santa’s …”

“Nooooooooooooooo! Do not say it, Daniel. Do not give me that mental image.”

Daniel sniggered to himself. He was good at the baiting thing, too.

They looked up at the darkening sky a while longer. A sneaky wind was getting up. There would be more snow before long.

“Charlie had a thing about clouds,” Jack said, quietly. He didn’t speak often or freely about his lost son, and Daniel was always profoundly moved and grateful for the trust it implied when he did.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Don’t know how many times he stopped whatever he was doing and look skywards. Then he pointed and said, ‘train.’ Whatever shape the cloud was, it was always a train.” Jack sounded a little distant, lost in thought, and Daniel waited him out. Waited to see if he wanted to say more or wanted to move on.

“That’s great,” Daniel said, edging his gloved fingers to touch Jack’s.

They fell into silence, which Jack needed and Daniel allowed, and then, back in the here and now, Jack suddenly said, “OK. Time for the lesson. Today, class, we are making snow angels.”

Daniel let go of Jack’s fingers.

“We are?”

“Oh yeah.”

“What are they?”

Jack sighed. “See? This is why I need to fill in this appalling gap in your knowledge. I mean, you know all about customs from thousands of years ago, why some long-lost culture ate roasted yak turds every third Thursday, but you know nothing about making snow angels.”

Daniel felt the need to defend himself. “I grew up in a number of countries, Jack. Most of them hot. Most of them places where your ass didn’t fall off because of the damn cold. Forgive my ignorance.” Lacing his speech with sarcasm felt so satisfying sometimes.

“Stretch your arms out, then move them up and down and match the movement with your legs. Like this.” Jack led the demonstration. “Et voila, snow angels.”

Daniel watched as Jack made the shape, then figured, what the hell, anything to get out of the cold, and followed suit.

And as he made his own angel, touched the snow, connected with the elements, felt the cold air move, and became immersed in the sheer, childlike joy of enjoying the moment, Daniel felt something break free inside. Some internal barriers that had been in place since he came back – whether of his own making or as a legacy of his time ascended he had no idea – vanished in the wake of the simple happiness of being here, right now, with Jack.

He felt alive.

It felt so good.

He started to laugh, a delighted chuckle that grew into a full-on belly laugh.

Jack smiled, a huge, nothing-but-happy smile, and leaned over to kiss him. Daniel closed his eyes and fell into the kiss, falling further into Jack with each passing second. Jack’s lips were cold, slightly rough with chapping and the added friction was wonderful. A soft moan caught in Daniel’s throat. Beneath the several layers of clothing, he felt himself harden, felt the beginnings of the slow burn of arousal, which was both new and stunningly, beautifully familiar.

Jack drew back from the kiss and Daniel opened his eyes to find Jack looking at him, gaze full of love and the promise of something else.

Daniel shivered. “Does that offer to check if my butt’s still there hold?” he asked.

Jack grinned. “Sure does.”

“If it is still there,” Daniel said, thoughtfully, “would you consider butt-snuggling to warm it up again.”

“I can butt-snuggle. I can snuggle butts.”

Jack kissed him once, hard, then got to his feet, holding out a hand to pull Daniel up, too.

“Then can we have dirty, naughty and loud sex?” Daniel asked as they trudged side by side towards the house.

It was starting to snow.

“As dirty, naughty and loud as you like, “ Jack promised. “Just don’t scare the reindeer.”

 

ends


End file.
